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Ownership of the Means of Thinking
Crawford's 2025 essay extending Marx's analysis of industrial capitalism to cognitive labor — arguing that AI concentrates cognitive power in the corporations that own the infrastructure.
Ownership of the Means of Thinking is Crawford's 2025 essay developing the political-economic implications of his philosophical framework for the AI age. The essay's central claim — deliberately Marxist in structure — is that the AI revolution extends the logic of oligopoly into cognition itself. If the means of production determined the distribution of economic power in the industrial age, the means of thinking will determine the distribution of cognitive power in the AI age. The corporations that own the AI systems own the infrastructure through which an increasing proportion of professional knowledge is produced, and the ownership confers a form of power that is unprecedented in scope — not merely economic power over production but cognitive power over the processes through which professionals understand the world they work in.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay's argument extends Crawford's analysis of Taylorism into the present. Taylor separated thinking from doing and relocated thinking to the planning office,